Sunday, 27 April, 2014

Few years back, I designed a four-days training program, then called Micro-MBA for delivering it to my colleagues at L&T Infotech, Mumbai. My colleague, Sharvari, helped in designing this program and also delivered some sessions. We received encouraging feedback that time. I repeated this course last time at Chennai and again received good feedback from participants.

I always wanted to conduct this program more number of times. But its length of four days not only discourages participation by busy working professionals but also it makes difficult for me to find these many free days consecutively. This constraint prompted me to think whether this program can be conducted online.

For last several months, I am reading about online learning and I have got convinced that blended learning is a way to go. Yes, some learning content can be delivered online but some learning methods such as case study discussion or group discussion requires classroom sessions. So I have now started redesigning this program.

As a first step, I am redesigning this course to be delivered in 24 hours. Out of 24 hours, classroom sessions will run for 14 hours as seven sessions of two hours each. Rest 10 hours will be delivered as videos (slideshow with voice over). I have divided the course curriculum in five parts - Business Organization, Marketing, Money Matters, Manager's Toolbox and Strategic Management. Each part will have 20 clips, thus online component of this course will have 100 clips of around 6 minutes each. Each clip will answer one question. So one can get answers to 100 questions by watching these clips. Each part also has two discussion points that will be covered during five classroom sessions of two hours each. Final two classroom sessions of two hours each will be used for case study discussion.

As I will work on preparing 100 questions, I will share them on this blog. Once I start recording clips for these questions, I will start uploading them on YouTube. I plan to eventually host the list of questions with videos on single public web page. I hope to receive feedback on my work so that it can be refined further.

I am thinking of naming this course as Crash Course in Business Basics (c2b2). I hope nobody is holding trademark on this name. I plan to release my this work under appropriate Creative Commons License.